I spent the afternoon working on dust collection because I like to play with my power tools in the basement and power tools make a lot of dust, which gets everywhere. In fact, Our Humble O’Bode may be as dusty as it is, and it is nothing if not very dusty, because I play with power tools in the basement. I’ve got a lot of guilt about that, but I can’t afford a for-real dust collector, which is an air handling system powerful enough to suck road gravel through a garden hose, so this need has gone unfilled and my guilt has remained unassuaged for years. It’s been hell.

Then, last week, one of the bloggers I follow who also plays with power tools in his basement but who also happens to be an engineer and can afford things like a dust collector, linked to a post from a guy who not only plays with power tools in his basement but also modifies them so they’ll work even better. The post explained how he added a Thien baffle to his dust collector (everybody else who plays with power tools is apparently an engineer and can afford his own personal dust collector) and, while he was at it, he modified his shop vac by adding a cyclone extractor and a Thien baffle. This improved his shop vac to the point that, if it could suck road gravel through a garden hose, it wouldn’t get messed up. Wowzers.

I have only a very lame idea how a Thien baffle works, probably because I’m not an engineer. But – and this is the important thing – I don’t care, so long as it, in fact, works. I wasn’t at all sure that it would, and I even thought that it was probably just an elaborate internet hoax, but I tried it anyway because a five-gallon bucket only costs five dollars and I had almost everything else I needed to build a cyclone extractor using a Thien baffle in my scrap bucket. I knocked one together in an afternoon and, what do you know, it worked. I still don’t know how, but I still don’t care.

It was kind of a slapped-together thing, though, and wouldn’t stand up to long-term use, so this afternoon I rebuilt it. It still works. I can vacuum up everything from sawdust to wood chips to scrap wood. If it fits through the hose, it all ends up in the bottom of the cyclone separator instead of gumming up the filter of my shop vac. The internet is awesome, that’s all I can say.